ENG
111
Fall
2002
READING
GUIDE: Extraordinary Minds, chapter
6—Introspector: The Case of Woolf
Vocabulary
. . .
|
Tour
de force (p. 87) |
Venue
(p. 87) |
Replete
(p. 91) |
|
Diffident
(p. 92) |
Ambivalence
(p. 93) |
Anomaly/-ous
(p. 93) |
|
Psychotic
(p. 93) |
Repartee (p. 93) |
Candor
(p. 93) |
|
Mundane
(p. 94) |
Quotidian
(p. 94) |
Conundrum
(p. 98) |
|
Exogenous
(p. 100) |
Epiphany
(p. 101) |
Incubus
(p. 102) |
Notes
. . .
This
chapter is on the British novelist Virginia Woolf, who Howard Gardner says,
“stands out as an Introspector—one who peered inward, seeking to understand
herself as an individual, a woman, a human being.” It’s a problem chapter for a couple of reasons.
One of them is the same difficulty we had
with Mozart. You’ll recall that we
needed to sort out, or determine the relationship between, Mozart’s mastery of
the domain of classical music on the one hand, and his being a prodigy, and the
prodigiousness of out output, on the other.
How can we look at Woolf and distinguish between (1) those features that
are common to all Introspectors and (2) those that are idiosyncratic? As we’ll see, Woolf’s experiences were
certainly formative, but they were not typical: she was on the margins of society in several respects. I don’t think Gardner is suggesting that a
person must be a bisexual, psychotic woman to qualify as an Introspector. But is some kind of marginality a
requirement?
The
other difficulty transcends the selection of a person to illustrate one
category or another, and addresses the categories themselves. Gardner has made it clear from the outset
that there are no hard and fast boundaries between the categories, and we have
seen that in the case of Freud. Gardner
says that Freud was “one of the signal Introspectors of all time.” Yet on the basis of founding a new domain,
psychotherapy, he is classified as a Maker.
When we read about Gandhi, we’ll see that he reflected on his
experiences constantly, maybe even obsessively. To my way of thinking, his autobiography, The Story of My
Experiments with Truth, is much more an introspective text than some sort of
manifesto. He is, however, classified
as an Influencer.
Ok. This might not be as tidy as some of us
would like it, but I can see why Gardner argues that Freud is primarily
a Maker, Gandhi primarily an Influencer. The waters get murkier, however, when we must distinguish what’s
primarily between Introspectors and Masters.
Mozart, Gardner says, was not introspective. Hmm. Very convenient of
him, then, to choose Mozart as an example.
We’ll do some reading for the next several class sessions that I have
chosen deliberately because they are not convenient. We’ll learn about the painter Mary Cassatt and the poet Adrienne
Rich. They are Masters, but, to
paraphrase Gardner, they peer inward, seeking to understand themselves as
individuals, women, and human beings.
Should we see them as Introspectors who happen to have mastery in their
respective domains? Or are they Masters
primarily, who just happen to introspect?
At what point do the scales tip from one category to another?
Please
note that these three examples—Woolf, Cassatt, Rich—are all women. Are creative women more inclined to
introspection than creative men? If so,
why might that be?